Four days after registering a new domain, I opened GA4 and saw 65 page views / 34 users / 9 countries.
For a brief, build-in-public moment, I almost cheered. Then I looked at the breakdown. The US had 17 sessions averaging 4.9 seconds of session duration. France, Poland, South Korea, India, Singapore: each between 0 and 1.4 seconds. Japan alone sat at 751 seconds (over 12 minutes): an outlier so loud it should be illegal.
The domain is . It catches classical crawlers but misses:
JavaScript-executing crawlers: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot. These new generative-AI crawlers run JS, so the GA4 tag fires.
SEO-tool crawlers: AhrefsBot, SemrushBot, MozBot. High frequency, and they swarm new domains the moment they're discovered.
Headless-browser scrapers: Custom Puppeteer or Playwright bots are indistinguishable from a real Chrome session.
The week after a new domain registration is when this crawler army discovers the new IP. It calms down within 7–10 days as DNS propagates. But if you take week-one GA4 at face value, you'll make bad decisions.
Three annotations every new-project dashboard needs
Use "Engaged Sessions" as your primary metric. GA4 defines an engaged session as: ≥10s duration OR ≥2 PV OR a conversion event. Most of the bot army gets filtered here.
Always view session duration split by country. Looking at any single metric (sessions, PV) without the geo filter lets the crawler army masquerade as success.
Treat the first 30 days as a "noise phase." Real numbers only appear after social funnels, SEO, and content depth all line up.
Closing: look at your own GA4 with this lens
A new domain's GA4 lies for the first 1–2 weeks. If your country breakdown is full of zero-second sessions from the US, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia: that's the crawler parade, not humans falling in love with your content.
The procedure is simple: beat with five signals → suspect bimodal distributions → swap the primary metric to Engaged Sessions. Doing this saves you from being whipsawed by early data.
Doubting GA4 is, in the end, a discipline for not making expensive mistakes. Beat the data before the data beats you.
This post is based on real data
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